61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

Camouflage was ambivalent in theory as in practice. The Nazis’ reservations
about a practice to which they had given a name, and actively encouraged and
propagated on and off, were not unfounded. On the one hand it aided the war
economy; on the other it facilitated insubordination in the form of the
withdrawal of funds which business owners and private individuals sought to
move abroad mainly because, in view of Germany’ risky policies, they wanted
to limit their losses. It was very easy to feign one activity in order to engage in
another, and the tyrannical Nazi system cleared the way for such ambiguity.
Numerous German businessmen no doubt transferred money abroad primarily
as a security cushion for a future they considered highly uncertain. It is impossible
to tell how often this happened, but the people involved must have put
forward reasons acceptable to the regime, lest their applications be refused.
Funds taken abroad in this way would in some circumstances remain in
Switzerland throughout the war, without being of any great benefit to the
German war economy. Not only cautions sceptics availed themselves of camouflage;
the same was true of persons opposed to the regime. Robert Bosch AG,
for example, made its links with Sweden and within Switzerland available for
the purpose. 22 Representatives of the Third Reich or of the Party responsible for
shaping foreign exchange policy and the strict controls of investments abroad
were able to break their own rules when it was in their interest to do so.
Camouflage activities were devised because of an uncertain future, and were
aimed at keeping the situation open and at delaying – or preventing where
possible – the developments feared: loss of control and seizure of property. They
acquired their definitive meaning only as events progressed. What would, in
the event of a German victory, have looked like a successful move in the
economic war, could very easily in the totally different situation after 1945, be
portrayed as insubordination against the regime.
The purpose of the camouflage activities is most obvious in those paradoxical
cases where all such measures were expressly avoided, and ownership was passed
unconditionally to neutral persons of trust. Thus, in June 1940, after the
contractual arrangement with IG Farben had been cancelled, IG Chemie was
transferred to the Swiss administrators of the complex, who thus also assumed
responsibility for the US factories threatened with seizure. 23 This took place in
the hope that after the war a new arrangement could be found making it possible
for both the Swiss and the American partners to rejoin IG Farben. The war put
paid to this assumption and left the Swiss – on paper – as owners of one of the
largest complexes of chemical factories in the USA. In this case, however, the
policy of non-camouflage failed because of the extensive mistrust of all steps
taken by the Germans. In Switzerland, as in the USA, leading groups assumed
during the war that the apparently simple, neat separation of IG Farben from
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